Housing market expert and chart lover Logan Mohtashami has a clever way of making big points with little facts. So here’s one he tapped onto my Facebook page recently. IBM 431K workers 200 Billion market cap Facebook 7,335 workers 200 Billion market cap You follow? That’s efficiency in action. It’s possible [Keep reading]
You couldn’t get nine out of 10 Americans to agree that the sky is blue. So it’s remarkable that nine out of 10 say they have lost control over how their personal information is collected and used by corporations, a new survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center has found. [Keep reading]
There’s “employed” as defined by government statistics. And then there’s “employed,” but not even working enough hours to pay the rent. Roughly five percent of U.S. workers are stuck in part-time jobs when they really want full-time work. It’s a problem that’s not going away, even as the headline [Keep reading]
I once wrote a story about a man who, crushed under student loan debt, said he wish he’d gone to prison rather than college. “(College) was the biggest mistake of my life,” Hernan Castillo told me. “At least I would have learned a trade or two and started being independent [Keep reading]
You can probably rattle off the risk factors for heart attacks, stroke, cancer, and other causes of premature death with ease: smoking, poor diets, lack of exercise, and so on. Here’s one you probably haven’t considered: Loneliness. I’ve been discussing restlessness and American culture for a few months now in [Keep reading]
Election day this year made clear that most Americans, even Red and Blue Americans, agree on one thing. No, it’s not that Obama is bad (or good). It’s not “change.” Or even mistrust of Washington. It’s this: American workers aren’t paid enough. Worker pay wasn’t on the ballot, exactly. But [Keep reading]
“Americans don’t have a debt problem, they have a spending problem.” That conventional wisdom has been repeated so often that many folks will believe it uncontested. It doesn’t stand up to examination, however. What Americans have, quite clearly, is an income problem. Median adjusted household income has hovered between $50,000 [Keep reading]
Here’s another strong hint that technology is making us dumber, and more critically, less sympathetic people. British scientists published a study last month showing that second screeners — people who watch TV while playing with their cell phones, for example — have smaller brains in places where it matters: a [Keep reading]
John Southerland knows where every penny goes. In fact, after reading other Restless Project budgets, he sent me a spreadsheet detailing all of his family’s expenses for the past 10 years. And his perspective is simple: For his family, a middle-class income doesn’t support a middle-class way of life. “I [Keep reading]
At church recently, a friend expressed shock that a family might pay $2,500 or so per month for their mortgage. “Their house must be too big,” she said, in essence. I objected, saying such house payments are pretty common. But I wanted to be more specific, so I worked with [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan